Fishing with Dad is now a bonding opportunity

I’m writing from Crooked Creek.

The water is cool and clear. I’m up to my hips in it. It’s a bluebird summer day. Barely a cloud in sight. Dad’s ahead of me in his kayak. Mine’s tied to my waist as I wade through the current and make looping casts upstream. Always upstream, that way the bait floats back down and hopefully into a hungry smallie’s mouth.

I learned how to creek fish when I was in elementary school. We started off fishing in water much closer to home, the Piney and the Illinois Bayou. Over the years, we ventured farther and farther north, until we ended up in Yellville, a tiny town with a barbecue joint, a motel, a pizza place and the best smallmouth fishing in the state.

I didn’t always love the whole thing. Matter of fact, I didn’t really like it much at all. I was too young and the days were too long. We’d leave the house around sunrise and get back long after dark. We dragged our boats through the chutes when the shallows dried up. We ate Vienna Sausages from the can. I wasn’t a big fan of those, either.

Sometimes, I’d sing to pass the time. If I wasn’t singing, I was talking, asking myriad probing questions that mostly went unanswered. This grated on Dad’s nerves. Just like my ineptitude with a rod and reel. I’d cast into trees and break my line. I’d gut hook a beautiful brownie, which meant Dad would have to take out the pliers and go digging around inside the fish’s mouth.

It was always something.

As a result, Dad didn’t get to fish much, but he kept asking me to go. I thought it was weird. I didn’t think he was enjoying those trips. I knew I wasn’t. Yet, still, we went.

A father myself, I now understand the paradox Dad was up against. My kids are 6 and 3. We live on a lake. We go fishing almost every day. It’s not what I’d call “enjoyable,” but when they ask me to thread a worm on their hooks, I do it. Heck, sometimes I even ask them if they want to go fishing, just like my dad kept asking me.

As the years wore on, Dad’s and my trips changed. I learned how to tie my own knots and take a fish off the line. I got to where I could make a proper cast. We started catching more fish. We drank beer. And strangely enough, we began doing the one thing Dad never wanted to do when I was younger — we talked.

I’ve learned more about my father while fishing than at any other time. There’s something about the water and the Coors Light that opens up doors to a history that he kept hidden from me for so long.

One of my favorite lines in all literature comes from Bernard Malamud’s great novel “The Natural”:

“We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.”

Maybe all that suffering we did in the early years, all those long hot days and hooked thumbs and lost fish, served as a penance of sorts. Maybe we had to endure those outings to truly experience the joy we now feel when we take to the water.

Maybe the same will be true of my kids. Maybe, one day, when they’ve learned how to cast a spinning reel and paddle a kayak, they’ll join us as we set off for Crooked Creek.